The Horrible Tawana Brawley Hoax

The Tawana Brawley story emerged at a time when
the civil rights movement “was coming unglued,” to quote Manning Marable, director of Columbia
University’s Institute for Research in African
American Studies. Jesse Jackson was promoting
himself as a presidential candidate; Louis Farrakhan
was gaining influence as the voice of black
separatism; Al Sharpton was eager for any media
attention. These influential men, and many lesser
racial careerists, were hungry for some dramatic
event that would propel them into
the spotlight.

On Saturday, November 28th, 1987,Tawana Brawley,
a black teenager just three weeks shy of her sixteenth
birthday, was “found” inside a big plastic trash bag
by one Mr. Lorenzo Lloray, whose wife, Joyce Lloray, had
seen Tawana sneak around the corner of the building
opposite the Lloray’s apartment, climb into the trash
bag she had brought with her and lie down. Mrs.
Lloray had sent Mr. Lloray to see what was up.
Tawana would not respond to Mr. Lloray’s questions.
The police were summoned and the teenager was
transported to a hospital. Tawana’s mother, Glenda
Brawley, and her mother’s live-in boyfriend, Ralph
King, were called to the hospital. Ralph arrived at
Saint Francis Hospital reeking of alcohol and began
ranting things such as “Don’t talk to those white
fucking cops...” and “I’m not an ignorant nigger. I
will call a lawyer!”

Tawana’s mother and Ralph King requested that
Tawana be interviewed by a black police officer. A
black officer was brought in from Poughkeepsie to
Wappingers Falls to interview her. Tawana would not
speak, but when the officer gave her his duty
notebook she wrote down the words “white cop.”
When he asked her if she meant that a cop had done
whatever had been done to her, she nodded. The
officer then asked Tawana where it had happened and
she wrote down the word “woods.” When the officer
asked her the location of the woods, she gave no
response. The officer then asked Tawana if she had
been raped and she responded by writing down the
words “a lot.” He asked her if her assailant was white
and she nodded “yes.” She did not respond when
asked if there had been one assailant or two, but when
asked if there had been three assailants, she nodded
“yes.” A protracted series of questions drew
occasional nods, from which a vague description of
Tawana’s “attacker” was drawn: strawberry blond, 32
years old, six foot four inches tall, and thin.

The police report stated that Tawana’s body, hair and
clothes were smeared with excrement and that the
words “NIGGER” and “BITCH” and “KKK” were
written on her torso with charcoal.

The volatile mix of sex and race and violence drew
an eager pack of “journalists” seeking sensational
details. In this heated environment casual remarks
became news and hearsay was accepted as fact. The
New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the
Washington Post, and the Workers’ World News
Service fell over one another in their eagerness to
print any sensational utterance. The white-hot
spotlight was on Wappingers Falls, New York and
that spotlight quickly drew the publicity-hungry
racial-politics buccaneers.

On December 14, 1987, Nation of Islam leader Louis
Farrakhan led one thousand chanting marchers
through Newburgh, New York in support of Tawana. On
February 10th, Bill Cosby put up a $25,000 reward
for information leading to “the truth” and revealed
his darker side with a series of vile racist
generalizations about white people. On April 4, 1988
the Reverend Al Sharpton and career activist Pete
Seeger kept things boiling at a big protest rally in
support of Brawley at the State Capitol in Albany. A
big womens’ march paraded through midtown
Manhattan in support of Tawana. Mike Tyson (who later became a
convicted rapist of a black woman) gave Tawana a
diamond-studded Rolex watch. Phil Donahue
broadcast live from a pro-Brawley rally. Every day
for seven months, while the grand jury was
investigating this case, protestors were bussed in to
chant and rant outside the courthouse, often led by the
Reverend Sharpton personally.

Tawana’s mother and her mother’s boyfriend, who
stood to share a multi-million-dollar settlement paid
by the taxpayers, quickly called in three advisers who
were also three of America’s most incendiary racial
provocateurs: attorneys C.Vernon Mason and Alton
H. Maddox, and the Reverend Al Sharpton.

When Harry Crist, Jr., a part-time policeman who
only slightly fit Tawana’s vague description of her
“assailant,” committed suicide days after Tawana was
“found,” investigators tracked his whereabouts for the
time that Brawley was missing from her mother’s
home. Crist’s alibi witnesses for his whereabouts
were Assistant District Attorney Steven Pagones and
State Trooper Scott Patterson. Further investigation
revealed that Crist had been depressed over a series
of career setbacks and he had killed himself only
hours after the collapse of a relationship with a
woman he loved intensely.

With no evidence whatsoever, and disregarding the
cruelty his accusations would have on the Crist
family, the ever-reckless Al Sharpton proclaimed that
Harry Crist was one of Tawana Brawley’s attackers.
To dispose of Crist’s inconvenient alibi witnesses,
Sharpton declared that Pagones and Patterson were
also among Tawana’s attackers. He claimed that
Pagones had murdered Crist to silence him and that
the report of a suicide was part of a big cover up.
Sharpton also made the berserk claim that Attorney
General Robert Abrams had masturbated while
leering at photos of Tawana Brawley. Sharpton
compared Abrams, who is a Jew, to Adolf Hitler. The
freebooting trio of Mason, Maddox and Sharpton
declared a connection between then-Governor Mario
Cuomo and organized crime as well as the Ku Klux
Klan. In May 1988, the Reverend Al, then a guest on
ABC’s Geraldo Rivera Show, declared: “Mr.
Pagones and his organized crime cronies are
suspects!” a charge he repeated on Nightline,
WWOR-TV, Phil Donahue’s show and numerous
other programs. On dozens of occasions Mason,
Maddox and Sharpton depicted Steven Pagones as a
racist sexual predator. “He was one of the attackers,
yes,” declared Alton Maddox in a nationally covered
news conference. “If I didn’t have direct evidence, I
wouldn’t be sitting here saying that.”

A grand jury patiently listened to seven months of
testimony. They heard from one hundred eighty
witnesses; they saw two hundred fifty exhibits and
recorded six thousand pages of testimony. Finally,
they released an extensive one-hundred-seventy-page
report wherein they concluded that Tawana Brawley
had never been abducted, assaulted, or raped and
sodomized as had been claimed by Tawana,
Sharpton, Mason and Maddox. The report further
concluded that “the unsworn public allegations
against Dutchess County Assistant District Attorney
Steven Pagones” were false and had no basis in fact.

Subsequently, Steven Pagones, whose life had been
made a shambles by repeated false accusations,
answered a challenge from the reckless Al Sharpton
to sue him if Sharpton’s allegations were false.
Pagones sued.

Mason, Maddox and Sharpton were all named as
defendants because of their reckless public
pronouncements. Tawana Brawley was also named
because of her repeated endorsement of the
allegations her advisers had made. On June 12, 1988
on WABC-TV (Channel 7 News) Tawana Brawley
said: “...we know what we’re doing and approve of
everything the Rev. Al Sharpton said and our lawyers
said.” Also: “I know everything that is said in my
name. . .I agree with everything they’re doing.”

There was never a shred of evidence that Tawana
Brawley was ever abducted or sexually abused by
anyone. She claimed to have been savagely raped
repeatedly over a four day period by six burly men
and yet not a single sperm cell could be found in her
vagina. Despite her claim of violent bumping and
grinding against her pubic area, not a single
Caucasian pubic hair could be found on her body or
clothing. She claimed to have been repeatedly
subjected to violent anal rape (“in two different
ways” according to Sharpton) over a four day period
by six big men, and yet a medical examination found
her anus to be perfectly intact without even the
slightest abrasion or laceration. The same was found
to be true of her sex organ. The words “NIGGER”
and “BITCH” that were written on her torso with
charcoal were upside-down, as though Tawana
herself had written them. Charcoal was found under
her fingernails, but on no one else. The excrement
that was smeared on Tawana’s body, at first falsely
reported by the press to be human excrement was, in
fact, animal excrement. DNA testing proved beyond a
doubt that this excrement was from a collie named
Remi, who frolicked in a yard close to Tawana’s
mother’s home. When she was “found,” Tawana had
cotton wads in her nostrils to ward off the stink of the
dog poop. Was it given to her out of kindness by the
monsters whom she claims abused and degraded her
for four days, by the sub-humans who supposedly
raped and sodomized her “a lot”? She was seen
sneaking about and climbing into the plastic trash bag
all by herself. She said she was raped in “the woods”
over a four day period, and yet no leaf fragments or
plant matter could be found on her person or clothing.
What was found on her body, hair and clothes were
abundant bits of debris that matched debris from a
vacant apartment that the Brawleys had recently
moved out of and to which Tawana had a key.

Tawana’s teenage friends described her as a party
girl. Was she partying at the apartment for those four
days? Or was she hiding out? Her relationship with
her mother, who bore Tawana at age 16, had always
been stormy. She was raised by an aunt. Her mother’s
live-in boyfriend, Ralph King, didn’t like it when
Tawana stayed out late and Ralph had a nasty temper.
He was a tough ex-con who had done prison time for
murder. What would he have done to her when she
finally came home after a four-day absence with no
good explanation? Tawana would need a doozie of an
explanation. Newspapers quoted a former boyfriend
as claiming that Tawana made up the rape story to
avoid a nasty beating.

Tawana and her family left New York State in 1988
having refused to cooperate with the grand jury and
having refused all invitations to testify under oath.
Tawana has never signed an accusatory statement or
participated in a proper identification procedure.

During the Steven Pagones defamation trial the
defendants, Mason, Maddox and Sharpton, continued
their bluster and buffoonery. Mason submitted an
offer of proof and requested permission of the court
to call Tawana Brawley to testify in his behalf. He
said Tawana would finally appear in court and testify.
Mason alerted the media and everyone eagerly
awaited her appearance. Tawana never showed. At
the commencement of the trial Steven Pagones
generously offered to hold Tawana not liable for
damages if she would testify. She refused.

Shortly thereafter, Tawana appeared before a partisan
audience of eight hundred in Brooklyn and caustically
dismissed Pagones’ offer as “a bribe.” A video tape
of this rally was entered into evidence. In his finding,
Judge Hickman noted: “The Court was appalled that
Brawley would see fit to travel from the Washington,
DC area to a rally in Brooklyn, but not see fit to travel
to Poughkeepsie to testify under oath before the jury.”

Weirdly, the defendants Mason and Maddox chose to
use as their defense the notion that Tawana had told
the truth about being repeatedly raped and violently
sodomized by six big white men over a four-day
period. The Court then opened the door for Mason
and Maddox to do so, affording them every
opportunity. The Reverend Sharpton took the position
that, under the First Amendment of the United States
Constitution, Al Sharpton could say anything in
public that popped into his head, without regard to
the truth of those statements.

Throughout the trial Mason and Maddox were given
every assistance in acquiring records from the
Attorney General, the Medical Examiner, the
ambulance personnel, the Sheriff and many other
sources. The Court issued many subpoenas on their
behalf. The Court assisted in arranging for the
appearance of a convict and an FBI agent, whom
Mason and Maddox wished to question.

Throughout the trial Mason and Maddox insisted that
they would prove that Brawley’s allegations were
true. It was all bluster. On repeated occasions, having
subpoenaed witnesses to the courthouse, they
withdrew their subpoenas and the witnesses were sent
away without testifying. Their reckless claim that
Harry Crist, Jr. had been murdered by Steven
Pagones remained unsupported by any evidence.
Their attempt to link Tawana Brawley’s chlamydia
infection to Steven Pagones also fell flat. Mason’s
early claim that medical records revealed five
different types of sperm found on Tawana Brawley
turned out to be completely bogus. There was nothing
whatever in the records to support this claim.

To quote from the Court’s finding:
“Meaningful medical evidence that Brawley
was raped and as Mason claimed, sodomized in two
ways, was totally lacking. It is inconceivable, even to
lay persons without medical expertise such as those
serving on the jury, that Brawley, a fifteen year old,
could have been repeatedly raped and sodomized in
two ways by six men over a four day period without
significant physical evidence to support her
allegations. The extensive cross-examination of those
who treated and those who observed Brawley after
she was discovered produced nothing of substance to
sustain these allegations.”

The Court signed a subpoena for the appearance of
Michael Baden, an expert in forensic pathology, now
widely known for his appearance at the O.J. Simpson
murder trial. At the last moment, the defendants
withdrew the subpoena. No other expert witnesses
were called to contradict the mountain of evidence
against the defendants. The renowned Dr Park Dietz,
famous for his study of the psychotic gay cannibal
Jeffery Dahmer, concluded that “Tawana Brawley’s
physical appearance when she was found is consistent
with self-infliction and a false accusation,” according
to the Grand Jury report.

In the end the Court found that Mason and Maddox
had failed to establish Brawley’s allegations. In Judge
Hickman’s words: “It is probable that in the history
of this state, never has a teenager turned the
prosecutorial and judicial systems literally upside
down with such false claims.”

Judge Hickman concluded that while allowances
might have been made for the teenage Tawana, more
than a decade had passed and today’s
college-educated Tawana was still making false and
defamatory allegations. A grand jury had spent seven
months considering the evidence which included 180
witnesses and 250 exhibits and producing 6000 pages
of testimony. A subsequent trial had demanded the
patience of jurors for eight and one half months. The
total cost was staggering.

At the August 14, 1998 Brooklyn rally Tawana
received an award and claimed “a crime was
committed on me.” Judge Hickman noted: “It is
indeed a sad day when one receives an award for
seeking to perpetuate lies and falsehoods.” He called
it “an absolute affront to the citizens who gave of
their time and talent to sit as members of the Grand
Jury and especially to the members of the trial jury,
who afforded a fair trial and rendered a true verdict at
great personal sacrifice while Brawley literally
thumbed her nose at the jury by not appearing to
testify under oath.”

Judge Hickman continued: “The Court therefore
determines that punitive damages should be awarded
to send a clear message to others that false allegations
of abduction, rape and murder or any other crimes
against innocent persons will not and cannot be
tolerated.” And further: “Tawana Brawley appears
caught up in her own fiction and unwilling or unable
to recognize the grief and hurt she caused those she
wrongly accused, especially the Crist Family, who the
Court hopes has found solace in the verdict of the
jury after all their suffering.”

The court awarded a punitive award against Tawana
Brawley of $180,000 in favor of Steven Pagones.
Alton Maddox was suspended from practicing law in
1990 because he refused to participate in an ethics
investigation of his role in the Brawley case.
C.Vernon Mason was barred from his profession in
1995 because of “a pattern of professional
misconduct.” When last heard from he was a
seminary student. Perhaps he will return as yet
another racial racketeer like the Reverend Jesse
Jackson or the Reverend Al Sharpton.

In 1998 Al Sharpton was ordered to pay Steven
Pagones $65,000 in damages. Sharpton did not pay.
With interest and penalties, the sum rose to $87,000.
By January, 2001, Pagones had only collected
$15,000 by having Sharpton’s salary garnisheed.
Pagones claimed that Sharpton was concealing his
wealth. Then a group of wealthy black men stepped
in to pay off Sharpton’s penalty. These rich men
included Percy Sutton, who heads Inner City
Broadcasting Corp.; Black Enterprise magazine
Chairman Earl Graves, Sr.; Essence publisher Ed
Lewis; lawyer Johnnie Cochran; Amsterdam News
publisher Bill Tatum; and auto dealer Richard
Gidron. Sutton was quoted in the New York Post as
saying: “. . .there were enough people who thought it
should be done to insulate [Sharpton] from any
further controversy,” which is laughable, because
you can’t isolate a dedicated racial polarizer from
controversy.

And what of the morally decrepit Tawana Brawley?
She has made an after-the-fact career of touring
college campuses at the invitation of black student
associations who reward her with fat fees for
repeating her filthy lies.